this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
314 points (98.8% liked)

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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
catch {
    exec('rm -rf /*')
}
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Back in my days working as .NET developer on Windows 7, I came into work one morning to find a colleague fuming that his machine had died on him.

He spent the whole morning reinstalling Windows and getting his environment set back up, and then pulled the branch he was working on, happy to finally be done with setup and get back to work. Ran his test suite and bam, machine crashes!

It was only at that point the penny dropped. We took a look at his branch, and sure enough he'd accidentally written a test that, when ran, deleted his entire C: drive!

That particular lesson made me very careful when writing any code that does things with the filesystem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Or, you know, run it in a chroot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Hey, if Valve gets to wipe home directories in released software, developers should get the chance to do it in their test code.

[–] lowleveldata 44 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm a big fan of just leaving the catch block blank as a nice fuck you gesture

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago

On Error Resume Next

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

You got the French language initials backwards, OP.

It should be rm -fr /*

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Also, to make sure there are no linguistic roots left over on your system that it might grow from again, add --no-preserve-root.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Certainly nicer than my SDL experience of catch { window.becomeunclosable(); }

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Having your filesystem on the line might actually make some people write decent code.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Halt and catch fire

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

The Apple way...